Israel has destroyed 31 tunnels. With her purpose in entering Gaza over, she’s pulling out, leaving a three-day ceasefire in her wake. It remains to be seen whether Hamas will lose patience before the three days are up.

At this point, Hamas has pretty much shot its bolt. Although the deaths of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah are unbearably tragic, they did not die in vain. It was the search first for them and then for their killers, that led an impatient Hamas to begin its rocket barrage against Israel. That escalation led to a state of war that enabled Israel to find the tunnels through which Hamas planned to stage a mass terrorist attack on Rosh Hashanah.

Now, Hamas has no tunnels and no weapons, and it’s lost many of its allies in the Muslim world. Moreover, no matter what Gazans say to the media about everything being Israel’s fault, I have to believe that, behind closed doors, the Gazan population is beginning to realize that Hamas is not their savior but, instead, leads inextricably to their destruction.

Sadly, the usual cast of stupid people and Leftists (but I repeat myself), isn’t learning the same lesson the Gazans have learned. They’re still talking about proportionality and how unfair it is that Israel has the means to defend herself against genocidal killers. What I’ve noticed on my “real me” Facebook, though, is that Jews at home (myself included) are talking back.

While the war may be winding down, the news about the war marches on, and I’ve got some good links:

Hamas Speaks — and yes, it does deliberately use civilians and their bodies to advance its war effort

The biggest news of the last 24 hours is the fact that the IDF captured and made public a Hamas handbook from the Shuja’iya Brigade. What’s fascinating about this book is that it makes explicit something that, previously, one could only extrapolate through data: Hamas intentionally uses civilians under its control in order to deter Israeli fire and increase Hamas’s propaganda standing:

In a portion entitled “Limiting the Use of Weapons,” the manual explains that:

In a portion entitled “Limiting the Use of Weapons,” the manual explains that:

The soldiers and commanders (of the IDF) must limit their use of weapons and tactics that lead to the harm and unnecessary loss of people and [destruction of] civilian facilities. It is difficult for them to get the most use out of their firearms, especially of supporting fire [e.g. artillery].

Clearly Hamas knows the IDF will limit its use of weapons in order to avoid harming civilians, including refraining from using larger firepower to support for infantry.

The manual goes on to explain that the “presence of civilians are pockets of resistance” that cause three major problems for advancing troops:

(1) Problems with opening fire
(2) Problems in controlling the civilian population during operations and afterward
(3) Assurance of supplying medical care to civilians who need it

Lastly, the manual discusses the benefits for Hamas when civilian homes are destroyed:

The destruction of civilian homes: This increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers [the IDF] and increases their gathering [support] around the city defenders (resistance forces[i.e. Hamas]).

It is clear that Hamas actually desires the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, knowing it will increase hatred for the IDF and support their fighters.

Far from Hamas intimidation, Indian news outlet reports honestly about Hamas’s use of civilian population areas

This report is being aired on NDTV and published on ndtv.com after our team left the Gaza strip – Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired. But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel’s offensive on Gaza’s civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones. (Emphasis added.)

I’ve included the video here, but you should check out the whole article.

Young Israeli soldiers lured into booby-trap when they try to rescue a Palestinian child

It’s not just that three beautiful young men died at Hamas’s hands, it’s that they died thinking that they were going to rescue a Palestinian child.

Bret Stephens turns to Pakistan to expose the world’s double standard about Israel

The fact that the world has a double stand when it comes to Israel — Muslims killing Muslims is boring; Jews killing Muslims is a moral outrage! — doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate it when someone publishes a piece that perfectly articulates that double standard. Bret Stephens is one of those perfect articulators, especially since he’s unearthed a story out of Pakistan that reads precisely like the situation Israel faces — and no one cares. (If you can’t get through the pay wall, do a Google search for the article, and you might get it.)

The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz

It was years ago that I first heard the expression “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” It struck me as an entirely accurate way to explain the hostility to Israel that characterizes so much of Europe. After all, Auschwitz didn’t just kill Jews, it revealed that Europeans, for all their slick, glittering, refined culture, are — or rather, can be — debased, immoral, cowardly killers under the skin. Those of us who are not in thrall to poor Anne Frank’s whistling-in-the-dark declaration that all people are “good at heart” understand that it’s not just the Europeans who have monsters lurking right under the surface. We all do. It’s just that the Europeans proved this premise first.

Even though I’ve never doubted the truth of that statement, for some years, a handful of people have always accused me of exaggerating when I said that Europe could never forgive the Jews. They pointed to other reasons that could motivate Europe’s anti-Zionism. One of those other reasons, of course, is the rising Islamic population in Europe. (I doubt though that this wildly, vocally, actively anti-Semitic population would have been welcomed if Europeans had forgiven the Jews.)

All of the above is to introduce Roger L. Simon’s post explaining that Jews around the world are at risk in part because Europe cannot forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

A courageous French Imam calls Hamas on the slaughter of its people

I mentioned in the introduction that people on Facebook are speaking up when others write in terms attacking Israel’s current operations in Gaza. One of my aces in the hole when I speak up is the fact that Hamas is so horrible, even Arabs are pulling back, realizing that Hamas does nothing to advance either the Arab or Muslims causes. One French-Moroccan Imam (and do remember that France is one the epicenters of Muslim/European antisemitism) spoke explicitly about Hamas’s failings. You have to read the whole thing. It’s amazing.

The New England Patriots have got themselves a new fan

I like American football a lot, but I’ve never been particularly interested in the New England Patriots. I am, and always have been, a 49ers gal. However, having heard about the letter that Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft wrote to Max Steinberg’s family, after that young American man (and Patriots fan) died volunteering with the IDF, I will surely root for his team whenever it plans — even if it plays against my own 49ers:

Imagine you have two perfectly matched militaries. One fights on behalf of a country that values the individual, liberty, and civil rights. The other fights on behalf of a theocratic dictatorship that hates, demeans, kills, and/or taxes everyone and everything that doesn’t conform precisely to the theocratic ideology. Which country would you root for in the war? Most people — at least those who believe that they are good people, would answer that they would support Country 1 and wish for Country 2’s defeat.

The question, then, is why Country 1 loses support if the hypothetical is changed slightly so that the militaries are no longer perfectly matched. Instead, Country 1 has a better military. Shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that it does?

To help you answer this question, let me please give you a nice illustration of the differing natures of Country 1 and Country 2 — While Country 2 abandons a sick, elderly woman to her fate, Country 1 cares for her gently and lovingly:

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve re-jiggered these portmanteau posts, with a new name and a new image. I’d like to thank all of you for your suggestions. I’ve gone with a vaguely newsy title and a picture from one of my favorite illustrators, and it just feels right.

I’ll continue tweaking the format until it works optimally. Today, for example, I’ll use mini-titles, instead of numbers, to separate items. Please let me know which system you prefer.

How many did you say died in Gaza? And are you really sure they’re dead?

Col. Richard Kemp (Brit. Army, Ret.) reiterates something we’ve heard before, although that vast numbers of people around the world need to be reminded about on a daily basis: Even as Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties (something America and her allies never did in past wars or in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Obama certainly hasn’t done with his drone strikes of dubious legality in Pakistan), Hamas lies about the nature and number of its casualties:

[W]e know now that Hamas have ordered their people to report all deaths as innocent civilians. We know too that Hamas has a track record of lying about casualties. After Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-09 fighting in Gaza, the IDF estimated that of 1,166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters. Hamas – backed by several NGOs – claimed that only 49 of its fighters had been killed, the rest were innocent civilians. Much later they were forced to admit that the IDF had been right all along and between 600 and 700 of the casualties had in fact been fighters. But the short-memoried media are incapable of factoring this in before broadcasting their ill-founded and inflammatory assertions.

Oh, and regarding my parenthetical point about the Muslim blood on Obama’s own hands, let me just reiterate a poster I created a couple of weeks ago:

In reality, when it comes to deaths in Gaza, official IDF casualty figures point to a somewhat different demographic than legions of dead children: According to the IDF’s calculations, 47% of those who died were terrorist fighters.

There’s one thing more that should make people suspicious about casualty figures issuing from Gaza: Elder of Ziyon noticed that Hamas is re-using a strategy first seen in 2008, when Israel engaged in Operation Cast Lead, trying to shut down Hezbollah: Hamas is dragging children’s dead bodies around to create media-friend, anti-Israel photo ops. I’m not surprised. Islamists have always been renowned for the horrors they inflict on the enemy dead, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be squeamish about their own dead.

Given that Hamas, primarily through threats, controls completely the “news” emerging from that region, and given that the media doesn’t want to admit that this limited access dovetails perfectly with its anti-Israel bias, it’s small wonder that The New York Times has taken to slandering its own photographers for their failure to produce any useful, independent photographs from within Hamas.

Michael Oren writes a rich, full-throated, compelling defense of Zionism. It’s not, and should not be, a dirty word. Instead, it’s reviled because it succeeded in a region that many in the world (Muslim autocrats, Leftists, America-haters, anti-Semites) would prefer to see fail.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily warned the White House “not to ever second-guess me again” on matters involving Hamas — and followed up by vowing that Israel will deal with Palestinian terrorists on its own terms.

And an illustrated reminder of that point:

UNRWA is Hamas.

One wishes that Bibi could also kick out UNRWA. It’s not just complicit with Hamas, says Daniel Greenfield (aka Sultan Knish) — it is Hamas:

The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it’s a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as “refugees”, it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

As I predicted when Obama became president and wooed Iran, it looks as if Israel is developing actual ties with those regimes in the Middle East that fear both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

When it comes to Israel, geography is destiny.

Mark Langham explains that, given Israel’s geographic position, she is both the first and last line between rampant Islam and Europe:

Obama’s unpleasantly mystic relationship to Hamas.

Today — August 4 — is Barack Obama’s 53rd birthday. This August 4th is also the anniversary of Tisha B’ Av, which is the 9th of Av in the ancient Jew calendar (meaning that it’s coincidence that Obama’s birthday coincides with it this year).

Yid With Lid says that, going back to the time of Moses, bad things have happened to the Jewish nation and the Jewish people on Tisha B’Av. Coincidence, of course, isn’t anything more than that — coincidence — but it still is fascinating to see how Obama’s name pops up on the Jewish screen on this day.

Los Angeles pro-Hamas rally reveals that those who oppose Israel also hate America.

I’m a shrinking violet when it comes to rallies. I’m just claustrophobic enough that it’s very difficult for me willingly to go to a situation in which I’ll find myself surrounded by people, many of them hostile. Fortunately for Israel’s defense, Donald Douglas isn’t so shy, so he took the time (and the risk) to check out an pro-Hamas rally down in L.A. Sadly for him, there was no overwhelming spontaneous pro-Israel rally to offset the hate.

Who really wants Obama’s impeachment?

Although there are many conservatives who believe that Obama is committing impeachable offenses, insofar as he’s abrogated legislative power even while abandoning his own executive obligations, no serious conservatives are demanding that he be impeached in the near future. With most of the country opposed to impeachment, doing that would be a suicide mission, especially before the mid-term elections. Nevertheless, talk of impeachment is swirling around the country. Why? Simple. It’s this year’s “war on woman” campaign strategy, aimed at terrifying the base and raising money.

Unlike the War on Women strategy, though, which was merely offensively dishonest, the current strategy is a cynical move that threatens to undermine our constitutional system. Ross Douthat took to the pages of the New York Times to make that argument:

[I]n political terms, there is a sordid sort of genius to the Obama strategy. The threat of a unilateral amnesty contributes to internal G.O.P. chaos on immigration strategy, chaos which can then be invoked (as the president did in a Friday news conference) to justify unilateral action. The impeachment predictions, meanwhile, help box Republicans in: If they howl — justifiably! — at executive overreach, the White House gets to say “look at the crazies — we told you they were out for blood.”

[snip]

This is the tone of the media coverage right now: The president may get the occasional rebuke for impeachment-baiting, but what the White House wants to do on immigration is assumed to be reasonable, legitimate, within normal political bounds.

It is not: It would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark.

And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.

Interestingly, when I linked to Douthat’s article on my “real me” Facebook, asking only “Do the ends justify the means?” everyone, Left and Right, was silent. I don’t know what to make of that.

Just because you’re a Native American tribe doesn’t mean you’re a nice tribe.

Years ago, I wrote a post about the Aztecs. The point of that post was that a small band of Spaniards didn’t single-handedly destroy one of the greatest pre-Colombian American empires the world has ever known. Instead, the Spaniards had lots of help from surrounding indigenous Indian populations. These Indians helped because the Aztecs were nothing more or less than the Nazis (or perhaps the Islamists) of the ancient world. They waged perpetual warfare against surrounding tribes, using captives as slaves and as human sacrifices in the bloody rituals that could claim tens of thousands of lives in just a few days.

What reminded me of that old post, and the fact that there was little noble about the Aztec savages, is a challenge to the current-day effort to paint Kit Carson as a genocidal Indian killer for his role in having relocated the Navajo. According to John T. Bennett, just as with the Aztecs, surrounding Native American tribes desperately wanted to see the aggressive, blood-thirsty Navajo go:

The Navajo were so disdained that several neighboring Indian tribes joined in the U.S. mission to relocate them. Interestingly, PBS’s series The Westreveals this point: “When Utes, Pueblos, Hopis and Zunis, who for centuries had been prey to Navajo raiders, took advantage of their traditional enemy’s weakness by following the Americans onto the warpath, the Navajo were unable to defend themselves.”

Reading about that relentless and endless back and forth between hot and cold made me think of these guys:

It also made me think of a classic Twilight Zone episode called The Midnight Sun.

Look who’s horrified by Richard Dawkins’ atheism now.

Although I’ve shifted to an amorphous theism, grounded in Jewish values, as I get older, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to atheists. It takes a lot of faith to have faith, if you know what I mean. I’m no fan of Richard Dawkins, though, because he’s made his name being obnoxious, heaping crude, fact-free invective on Christianity and Judaism.

To give Dawkins credit where it’s due, though, he’s also brave. He’s now turned his anti-religious venom on Islam, something Theo van Gogh discovered is a dangerous thing to do. And here’s where it gets funny: The same people (i.e., Leftists) who applauded Dawkins’ atheism when it was turned on Christians and Jews, are besides themselves with horror that he would dare to defame Islam. Kind of telling, isn’t it? The Left isn’t really atheists, because it doesn’t really care about God one way or another. What it is is anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. Clarity — it’s a good thing.

“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘a**hole’ is.”

As a veteran of arrogant law school professors (not all were arrogant, but enough were), I took more than the usual delight in watching Trey Gowdy make a Leftist law prof squirm as he tried desperately to pretend that Lois Lerner, when she called conservatives “a**holes,” wasn’t showing bias:

I walked away from a traditional law practice more than twenty years ago. At that time, I worked full-time as a research and writing attorney. When kids came along, I worked part-time as a research and writing attorney. When the recession came along, I began to work full-time as a homemaker, mother to my children, and daughter to my elderly mother.

When my husband periodically makes noises about my going back to work full-time, I just look at him funny. I’m too far away and too out-of-shape for that to happen (not to mention that we’d have to pay people lots of money to do what I do for home, children, and mother).

“American life is bifurcating into the undocumented and the overdocumented.”

All the disgrace-afflicted Arabs, whose honor has been defiled, and who have been kissing the boots of the Zionists and the Americans, are collaborating in the killing of Hamas, in the killing of the people in Gaza, in the killing of Islamic Jihad, and in the crushing of the Al-Qassam Brigades. I say to all Arab leaders,” before moving to his right and brandishing a large sword. “By Allah you deserve nothing but this sword. If you are real men, let the real men fight. If you are not real men, support the people of Gaza. Let them fight the Zionist enemy. Where are you Al-Sisi- who purports to be the president of Egypt? Where are the Arab leaders?” Al-Abdalet pondered as he waved the sword on TV. “Saudi Arabia bought $63 billion worth of weapons, which it hoards. Why? Because America showed up and used Iran to scare them: “Iran is a boogeyman, coming for you. You’d better watch out.”

Without thinking of this video:

It’s picture time!

I have my doubts about the veracity of this image (it’s entirely possible that the boys were just being punished, Pally-style, for being naughty), but I include it here FWIW.

Some commenters at both my “real me” and my Bookworm Facebook rightly (and politely) pointed out that those who attack the Twin Towers are not the same people as those whom Israel is now fighting. Israel’s enemy calls itself Hamas, while al Qaeda was the entity that took responsibility for bringing down the Twin Towers.

I laboriously explained that, even though the two organizations have different names and, more importantly, one is Sunni and one Shia, the overarching similarity that binds them is that they are both Islamic. All radical Islamic entities, regardless of sect or name, hew to the same basic principles: They hate Jews, Israel, America, Christians, Gays, Hindus, and Women. Those are the “fundamentalist” parts of all Islamic fundamentalists. Everything else is just window dressing.

In making that observation, I could have saved myself a lot of energy if I’d first seen this Dry Bones cartoon, which in a single picture, with just a few words, makes exactly the same point:

It’s quite flattering that, during the weekends, everyone in my world wants a piece of me. It also precludes blogging. I’ve saved a whole bunch of interesting sites, but didn’t have the time to write anything. I do, however, have some pictures to share with you. (And many thanks to both Caped Crusader and Sadie for helping me compile them.) Oh, and don’t leave before you’ve scrolled down to the bottom, because the sugary treat at the end is a brilliant Evan Sayet video.

I’m sneaking in a few minutes between appointments and telephone calls. It’s been a crazy day with appointments, endless telephone calls, contractors, and a house full of my family members (and, of course, the kids’ friends). Down time happens sporadically and I have problems focusing. I’ve got tons of good stuff here, though, so I’m ignoring my phone, telling the family to wait, and sharing things with you.

** 1 **

From where I sit, today’s big news is the fact that Hamas broke the cease fire practically within minutes of its going into effect. Two more young Israeli men have died. Worse, 23-year-old Hadar Ben Leiah has been kidnapped.

Why is Hadar’s kidnapping worse even than death? Well, first, Israel now proceeds with the knowledge that, whatever steps they take, Hamas will claim that Hadar’s eventually fate will be on Israel’s head. Second, in the midst of a hot war, everyone in Israel understands that Hadar’s fate will be unpleasant. If there’s one thing at which Arabs excel, it’s unpleasant fates. He is in my prayers.

Small wonder then, that Gershon Baskin, Israel’s top negotiator regarding Hamas, tweeted out an uncompromising message to the world:

Al Qassam just signed the death sentenced of many Hamas leaders. There will not be another Schalit deal.

Sure, the administration is making big noises about an “unconditional release,” and sounding upset that “individuals” broke the ceasefire. The fundamental fact, though, is that, in this relationship, little details like broken promises, murder, and kidnapping won’t dissuade a Leftist administration that views Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the starry-eyed awe of a teeny-bopper getting her first look at a teen idol. The fact that the teen idol is untalented, dissolute, and vicious won’t affect her. This is love — stupid, naive, credulous, doormat-like love.

If you want to see what Obama’s trajectory is, just look at the UN. Even as it condemns Hamas for violating the ceasefire, it’s urging another ceasefire and telling Israel to lay down her arms. Worse, it’s castigating Israel for refusing to share her Iron Dome defense system with the terrorists who are lobbing thousands of rockets at her civilians.

Believe it or not, though, when it comes to the Iron Dome defense, Obama is going one better than the UN. Although I can’t find the link right now (when I do, I’ll update this), the same system that saved Israel is also becoming a stick with which Obama can beat it. It turns out that, while Israel has the Iron Dome, an agreement with the U.S. means that only America has the rockets the Iron Dome uses — and Obama is trying to attack conditions to resupply the Iron Dome arsenal, which is nearly depleted.

Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Frankly, though, I don’t think what we’re seeing here is insanity, because the presumes a certain naive, ineffective good will behind the effort. What we’re seeing here is systemic support for evil. The UN and Obama may pay lip service by disavowing especially visible bad acts, but the fact is that they don’t expect different results because they like these results.

** 4 **

There is no doubt anymore in my mind, though, that Hamas must be utterly destroyed. Yes, something worse may fill the vacuum, and then Israel will have to destroy that something worse. In the meantime, though, Israel can no longer function with this blood-thirsty predator in her airspace and under her land.

And maybe if Hamas goes, then Israel can work on getting rid of UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated to the care and feeding of Palestinians to the Nth generation. Of course, even that isn’t simple. As The Times of Israel explains, if UNWRA pulls out, Israel suddenly becomes entirely responsible for a people made helpless by more than 60 years of ceding their independence and power to terrorists and bureaucracies.

** 6 **

Here’s one possibly good thing, though: I’m hearing from others who have observed what I’ve observed, which is that, this time around, barring the usual media bias towards Israel and the usual idiotic celebratory bloviating, there’s a different feeling in the air.

On my “real me” Facebook page, those who support Israel (Republicans and conservatives, of course), are flooding their feeds with pro-Israel information. Meanwhile, the DemProgs I know are totally silent. There are no posts explaining why Gazans are victims. There’s just . . . crickets. Danny Lemieux has also noticed that, at his place of worship, the usual reflexive anti-Israel feeling is lacking.

Have any of you noticed the same?

** 7 **

England was never philo-Semitic, but it used to be only kind of passively anti-Semitic. The Brits would make remarks about “dirty Jews,” but they wouldn’t do anything about it.

How Political Correctness and the unending influx of Muslims has changed that. England’s largest grocery store chain is boycotting Israeli goods. As if that’s not enough, its movie chains are barring non-Muslims. If there are any sane people left in Britain, I urge you to find a place to shop other than your local Tesco. It was never a very good store anyway. And you might want to think about abandoning the movies too.

** 8 **

From Obama’s point of view, there are probably several good things about the Israel-Hamas war: He can bully Israel; Jews are dying; he has the opportunity to advance the Muslim Brotherhood cause; and no one is paying attention to Obamacare. If they did, they’d notice that it is, as its critics promised it would be, an absolute disaster. At enormous cost, and with tremendous upheaval, it is decimating the middle class by depriving it of insurance as prices rise and insurers pull out of the market. Yes, some previously uninsured are now covered, but there were always less costly and destructive ways to make that happen.

The only good thing coming from the utter chaos Obama has ushered in during this, his second term, is the fact that voters are seeing Republicans as a good, even necessary, alternative.

The bad thing, of course, is that our Congressional morons are a bunch of spineless wimps, as is perfectly demonstrated by the border bill fiasco. Back in the old days, Republicans actually deported massive numbers of illegal aliens — and weren’t ashamed of that fact. They put Americans first and considered borders sacred.

** 10 **

Meanwhile, even as the world goes up in flames around us, our borders collapse, and bad actors flex their muscles, the Obama administration continues working tirelessly to render our military ineffective and, as to those troops serving in this dangerous world, helpless.

** 11 **

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a moron, and a sexist one at that. (If you’re blocked by the WSJ pay wall, I understand that you can do a Google search for this and other WSJ articles, and access the article through the Google link.)

** 12 **

Is Joe Lieberman the last honest Democrat? Reading him take the Obama administration to task for its massive failings abroad, including its betrayal of all of America’s traditional friends, one suspects that he is.

** 13 **

We’re now in the sixth year of the Obama Depression. Although his administration likes to point to some increases in employment numbers. These increases, however, are not good news. Labor market participation is at its lowest ebb in 40 years; the major beneficiaries of the uptick in employment are recent immigrants, not long-time Americans, and most of the jobs are in the minimum wage sector. Keep that last item in mind as you read how the Obama National Labor Relations Board is trying to destroy the franchise system that provides employment so many workers at McDonald’s and other chain franchises.

** 14 **

The thought of Joe Biden — Mr. Grope Every Woman I See — skinny-dipping is just revolting. No wonder the female Secret Service agents aren’t happy. Interestingly enough, just today I received an email with images of animals that have seen their owners naked. I can only imagine how much more extreme the response would be if they saw Joe Biden naked:

I really need to get a more innovative and exciting name for these round-ups, a name that will convey just how exciting these round-ups are. I find writing posts easy and naming them hard.

Perhaps you guys have a witty suggestion. I envision something along the lines of “The [Clever Name] : [primary topic] edition.” For example, “News from the Backlines: Israel edition.” It’s got to be something that will apply to every round-up post I do during the day, and I’d love it if it was witty.

Meanwhile, I’ll abandon my boring efforts at clever names, and try to entice you with scintillating tidbits about the world today:

** 1 **

It appears that the border bill, like Frankenstein’s monster, still lives. It’s bad, though, bad to the legislative bone. The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers has raised serious, substantive concerns.

** 2 **

Dan Gordon, who writes about the current war and the view from inside the IDF, is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. He has another wonderful post, this time about one of the men who ensures that the IDF is a humanist organization, no matter the labels the Israel-haters affix to it.

** 3 **

America has always used Israel as a pawn. During the Cold War, it was one of the players against the Soviet Union, so both America (the chess master) and Israel (the pawn) were on the side of the angels.

Obama, however, has turned the game on its head. He still views Israel as a pawn, but his game plan is to help the Muslim Brotherhood become ascendant. And if it doesn’t scare you that our president now feels secure enough to throw all his weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, you have nerves of steel, my friend.

Rob Miller has a different idea, which is that the UN can stop the killing of civilians by creating an opportunity for them to leave Gaza for temporary shelter in Egypt’s Sinai desert. Rob understands that this, too, will happen when pigs fly, especially since Ban Kai-Moon has joined in the media’s fetish for dead kids. In any event, Egypt doesn’t want even more Muslim Brotherhood supporters on its soil.

Meanwhile, Instapundit likes Matthew Yglesias’ idea: Just kick the Palestinians out. Israel should have done that back in 1967. The problem is that the Arab world wants them as little as the Israelis do. Palestinians, who have been nursing the grievances under UNRWA’s care for more than 60 years, are impossible. They just are.

** 6 **

For those naifs on the Left who can’t understand why the cycle of violence won’t stop, this video provides the answer: A sweet, smiling, soft-voiced young woman, whose child was the beneficiary of a life-saving procedure in an Israeli hospital, explains that there is no compromise. Palestinians must have Jerusalem, and whether children and others die in the process is irrelevant, because her culture is fine with death. Insha’allah, and all that you know.

A camera’s eye view of what an IDF soldier sees in Gaza. I got frightened and queasy watching. My suspicion is that the only people in America who can viscerally understand what this video shows are those who served in Fallujah:

One of Israel’s problems with Gaza is that it’s afraid that, if it clears Gaza out, the sequel will be worse. In other countries, when one clears a dictatorship out, something looking remarkably like freedom often takes its place. Only in the Muslim world is the deposed dictatorship replaced by something more deadly and vicious.

This economic parable is an old one, but the presidential spin is charming:

** 13 **

Rich Weinstein is the man who exposed Jonathan Gruber as a liar. Even more importantly, the video evidence he unearthed showed that Congress intended to limit subsidies to state exchanges. Learn more about Weinstein here.

** 14 **

And if you don’t believe that Gruber is a liar, just watch this:

** 15 **

Leftist WaPo blogger Greg Sargent was so excited to show that one draft of the Obamacare bill included federal subsidies that he completely forgot that, if Congress excludes that language from the final bill, the law mandates that Congress is presumed to have done so intentionally. Charles C. W. Cooke sets Sargent straight.

** 16 **

Ebola is scary and, in a completely interconnected world and one that, moreover, has wars raging all over and porous borders everywhere, it’s just a plane ride, a refugee crisis, or a border crossing away. To channel Elmer Fudd, “Be afwaid. Be vewy afwaid.”

** 17 **

AJStrata thinks that the Democrats’ impeachment games constitute politically suicidal gamesmanship. It’s so bad that even Time’s Joe Klein is accusing the Democrats (and, by extension, Obama) of cynicism — which is pretty funny when you think about it. Wasn’t it Obama who promised to take the cynicism out of politics, and to replace them with hope and change? Yeah. Right.

** 18 **

Don’t you sometimes want to bash people over the head with Milton Friedman? In France, the housing market has collapsed, thanks to Hollande’s decision to impose rent control. They just don’t seem to be able to come to grips that, wherever rent control exists, the housing stock shrinks, prices climb, and the poor and middle class are driven out of the market. They like to call themselves intellectuals but, really, they’re just dumb as rocks, only less interesting — something best illustrated by our French-looking Secretary of State next to a box of rocks:

Keep in mind that the environmental movement is a scam. There is nothing wrong and everything right with our being responsible stewards over the environment that God (or Nature) has so generously bestowed upon us. Conversely, there is everything wrong and nothing right with using false science to turn the clock back to a pre-industrial era.

As I write this, please keep in mind that every single prediction the climate change crew made has been proven to be false. (See, e.g., today’s story about the fact that islands are not sinking due to a predicted and apocalyptic rise in the oceans.)

In the fashion world, individually tailor-made clothes are a good thing. In the world of law and order, it’s a very, very bad thing when the government first looks at your conduct, and only afterwards crafts a crime tailor-made to that conduct. When this last happens, law and order go out the window and tyranny stalks the streets.

That’s why all of us should be very concerned about the fact that the Officer of the Comptroller of the Currency, under cover of the Bank Secrecy Act, seems to be trolling through bank data, trying to assemble, ex post facto, something criminal with which to charge any given bank.

When businesses and individuals no longer know in advance which conduct is legal and which is illegal, they become paralyzed or, alternatively, they figure if they’re going to be charged with a crime anyway, they should just stop worrying about legality from the get go. Once that happens, a society inevitably ends up with poverty, corruption, and anarchy.

** 21 **

I’ve always liked Bill Whittle, but I never realized that he shares with me a history of mental illness. Thank God we’ve both recovered and are now working to help other similarly afflicted souls:

At a military level, Hamas’s advantages in the war with Israel are minimal. Its rocket strikes were ineffectual against Israel because of the Iron Dome missile defense system. In the ground war, it is certainly able to kill Israeli soldiers (most recently, three died in a booby-trapped UN building), but ultimately Israel has both the overwhelming fire power and technology that will enable it to destroy Hamas’s weapons caches and tunnels.

Because of Israel’s military advantage, she could and would win the war against Hamas if only she were given enough time to do the job. You see, time is the one thing Israel lacks. Unlike all other nations warring against a savage enemy intent upon committing mass murder against her citizens, Israel is being pressured from every corner to lay down her arms, to bend down, and to take it.

Why is this? Why is a nation that is stable, free, pluralist, and humanist being urged to surrender to a terrorist group that is tyrannical, genocidal, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and homophobic?

The answer is simple: Hamas has the ultimate weapon of mass destruction — its own children or, as I like to call this weapon, the Dead-Child WMD.

Hamas uses its children in two ways. Alive, they deter Israel; dead, they inflame the West. It is this second effect that triggers worldwide demands that Israel lay down her arms as she seeks to destroy rockets that fire and her homes, schools, hospitals, and civilian airports, and that she stop destroying the tunnels that were readied to facilitate a terrorist attack on Israel that would easily have rivaled 9/11 in its destructive power.

In utilizing its Dead-Child WMD, Hamas understands that Israel is a nation that values life, not just the lives of her own citizens, but the lives of all the innocents trapped in a terrorist madhouse. To that end, the IDF will immediately call off a rocket strike on a known Hamas arsenal and rocket launch pad if it sees even a single child (or, indeed, any civilian) in the area.

The problem for Hamas is that planting rockets in schools, playgrounds, and hospitals only defers pinpoint Israeli strikes, it doesn’t stop them. Israel will either try again when there are no visible civilians or it will eventually make the soul-searing decision that, if it is to save its own children, sometimes it will have to take action that harms Gazan children.

With regard to the West, Hamas’s use of its Dead-Child WMD is even more cynical and much more effective. Hamas has figured out that, when ignorant people, unaware of the real nature of the combatants in this war, see pictures of dead children, they will automatically cast Israel as the bad actor. In this scenario, Gaza — which freely elected the tyrannical, genocidal, brutal, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, misogynistic, homophobic Hamas to govern it — is transformed into the hapless and helpless victim of a predatory Jewish nation.

Of course, any WMD is useless if it just sits there. It requires a delivery system. Fat Man and Little Boy would have been merely decorative if it wasn’t for the Enola Gay. Hamas also requires a delivery system for its Dead-Child WMD. Without that delivery system, the Dead-Child WMD is useless. If you’re a death cult, dead children are just one of those things.

So who or what is the essential delivery system for the Dead-Child WMD, without which the WMD would be inoperative? Again, the answer is simple: The Western media has become an indispensable part of the Dead-Child WMD by becoming that weapon’s delivery system.

It’s the Western media that hungers for Gazan snuff films. It has an insatiable desire to fill its pages and screens with pictures of little corpses, of screaming children covered with blood, and of wailing women and children huddled around small, still bodies. This mentality demands a steady supply of dead bodies, the more heart-wrenching and disturbing the better. Put another way, the Western media is complicit in the death of those Palestinian children because, without its endless demands for more images showing small, bloodied bodies, the Dead-Child WMD would instantly become completely useless.

What’s especially disturbing about the media’s complicity in the Gazan dead-child bloodbath is that its ceaseless craving for dead bodies has a fetish-like quality. That is, it doesn’t just want to sell its product by using pictures of any old dead kids. Instead, it focuses obsessively on pictures of dead children whose death, accurately or falsely, is alleged to have come at Jewish hands.

Even as it slavers after pictures of dead children in Gaza, the Western media is completely disinterested in the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of people, significant numbers of which are children, when Muslims do the killing. Whatever sick thrill the media gets from seeing dead Gazan kids evaporates when the dead kids have died in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Kenya, or any other place in which the Arab and Islamist killing machines are running riot.

If the world’s media were to announce tomorrow that it will never again publish pictures of dead bodies in Gaza, it would effectively disarm Hamas. Without the crucial delivery system needed to launch its Dead-Child WMD, all that Hamas would have left would be a rag-tag terrorist army, desperate to kill, but unable to defeat Israel’s greater military might. The war would end quickly, not because a liberal, pluralist, free society was bullied into surrendering, but because her tyrannical, genocidal, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian enemy would have been disarmed.

To echo Zola, “J’Accuse! Western media, the blood of all those dead Gazan children, the ones for whom you cry your crocodile tears, is on your hands. You have allowed yourself to become an essential component of the Hamas war machine and have therefore become complicit in a death cult’s willingness to kill its own children as a necessary precursor to committing genocide against the world’s Jews. You are therefore despicable and deserve to be denounced far and wide.”

Hang on to your hats, because this round-up’s a big one (and quite interesting too, I hope).

Reading through my own posts, I have a sense of a world rushing unstoppably towards something catastrophic. I think many feel this way, which is why they’re so terribly aware of the 100th anniversary of WWI’s onset, when a series of seemingly small events triggered the first of the 20th century’s blood baths.

Rather than think of current events as the beginning of the end, I’m trying to think of them as the building crisis that becomes before one can lance a boil. Lance too soon, and things only get worse. But if you let that boil come to a head, and lance it at the right moment, you kill the boil, not the patient.

It’s an ugly, graphic analogy, I know, but I often remind myself that, less than 100 years ago, shortly after WWI started, Rupert Brooke died after the battle of Gallipoli, not from a wound, but from an infected mosquito bite. It’s better if infections don’t start but, once they do, you have only a small window of time within which to defeat them.

As for Brooke, in the first heady days of WWI, when well-raised boys just out of school still viewed the war through a romantic, chivalric lens, and before the full horrors of trench warfare wiped out entirely Victorian innocence, he wrote this famous poem:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

** 1 **

While we’re acknowledging the past, I’m sorry to report that another great member of the greatest generation has passed: Theodore “Dutch” VanKirk, the last surviving member of the crew of the Enola Gay, died at aged 93. Paul Tibbets, the plane’s pilot, speaking of VanKirk, who was his navigator, and Paul Ferebee, his bombardier, described them once as “the best qualified airmen in the outfit.” VanKirk, especially, had an uncanny knack for getting the plane precisely over the designated target. Tibbets, VanKirk, and Ferebee, saw themselves as the Three Musketeers.

VanKirk never regretted his role in dropping the first atomic bomb:

“I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run,” VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. “There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese.”

He’s right, too. We now know that, had the war continued using traditional methods, while Japan would eventually have surrendered, it would only have done so after hundreds of thousands of civilians died on mainland Honshu. Moreover, 60,000 – 100,000 more Americans would have died. With those numbers, the atomic bomb was a no-brainer.

Dutch VanKirk, I salute you! Godspeed.

The crew of the Enola Gay viewed themselves as the “Three Musketeers” — the pilot, the bombardier, and the navigator.

** 2 **

PJ Media has put together a compendium of the way in which Hamas uses children, women, and animals — i.e., living beings within the society who have no free will — to carry out their dastardly double aims of killing Jews and manipulating world opinion.

A black Jewish woman cries “Shame!” at those American blacks (the majority) who support Hamas against Israel. She begins by reminding them that it was the Muslims who drove the slave trade in Africa, and then goes on from there.

** 5 **

Seth Mandel claims that Hamas’s tactics show that it’s losing the ground war. No wonder Obama is doing is best, vis-a-vis Israel, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Is Israel ignoring Obama, not just because he’s a useless, pustular excrescence on the world’s body politic, but also because they’re hoping to run out the clock on Hamas’s welcome amongst the Palestinians themselves?

** 8 **

The Israeli media has hurt the State Department’s feelings — and the State Department appears incapable of understanding that Israel, like America, has a free press. This means, of course, that the media’s statements are independent of the Israeli government. The State Department, however, is acting as if the Israeli media is like Pravda, or like any of the drive-by media outlets here at home, which robotically parrot the administration’s party line.

** 9 **

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but a lot of DemProgs are just plain stupid. A blog called The Delaware Liberal has put forward its plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas. The premise, of course, is that the combatants are morally equivalent. The DL therefore proposes that there be an externally-imposed one-state solution.

This is a typical Leftist trope, with its biggest proponent being Samantha Powers. That’s the kind of stupid we already know. What makes this specific proposal a new and wonderful stupid is this paragraph:

An international intervention, first offered voluntarily and if denied, forced on the two parties…probably with the UN as a peacekeeping force but with major trusted groups from both sides providing the reorganization: ie: the Arab League, UN and maybe NATO.

Yes, because the Arab League, the UN, and NATO have been such impartial, objective friends to Israel. For anyone who lives in Reality World, all of the objective evidence currently available indicates that the UN is actively complicit in advancing Hamas’s military and genocidal goals. No wonder Roger Simon says it must be stopped. (Not that it will be stopped, especially because it’s putting into practice what America’s foreign policy leader — that would be Obama — supports in theory.)

There’s an unconscious soft bigotry in the press coverage of the region. Nobody wants to accept that these exotically caparisoned militants are serious. They’re not out to ‘end the cycle of hatred’ or to ‘promote reconciliation’ or to ‘seek justice’. They are out for conquest. They are out for blood. They are determined to grind their heel into the enemy’s face and carry off everything he owns. Or, as one Iranian general put it: they are out to hunt the Jews house to house.

Yet even when they say it, we insist on misunderstanding them, as if they were retarded children, which they are not. “Surely you don’t mean that? Don’t you want a ceasefire? Of course you do. Can’t we all stand on a mountaintop and share a Coke?”

If we could only listen to ourselves we would conclude that we were loco in the coco.

The only thing that distinguishes Israel is they, alone of all the countries in the region, are the only ones willing to humor us. To put up with this crazy talk. Obama is Napoleon, in the sense that inmates in the funny farm are convinced they are the former Emperor of France. Sure boss, sure you’re Napoleon. Anybody can see that.

The Middle East is mentally at war. And the West is mentally on the happy ranch.

** 11 **

Using the Halbig decision as his starting point, Robert Tracinski has penned a mournful elegy for America’s once robust and intelligent approach to drafting laws.

** 12 **

For your convenience, fellow Watcher’s Council member Tom White (at VA Right) has put together a compendium of all the Gruber statements supporting the fact that, despite generally not knowing what was in the Obamacare bill, the Democrats in Congress definitely meant to limit subsidies to state exchanges:

** 13 **

“I was for Obamacare before I was against it.” That could be a quotation from the mouth of any college professor who thought Obamacare was a great idea (and propagandized to his students about it), but has now discovered that, when actually put into play, Obamacare is a bad deal for college professors. I’d be laughing myself sick if they were the only ones suffering from this legislative travesty.

** 14 **

Things are starting to emerge about Lois Lerner, and I’m not talking about evidence regarding her professional capacity as the leader of an IRS program to destroy use the IRS’s incredible power to silence pro-Israel, anti-Obama voices by denying them the tax-free status awarded to DemProgs. Instead, we’re learning about Lois Lerner, the person.

For example, we now know she’s Lois Lerner the conservative hater (they’re “a**holes”):

We’ve also learned that she’s Lois Lerner the class snob and spelling idiot (sneering at the “hoi paloi”):

It’s all well and good to sneer right back at Lerner, but it’s worth remember that she is part of a Democrat elite class that runs the administrative branch of this country and that, thanks to public sector unions, has made itself virtually untouchable.

So, Jesse Ventura managed to win a $1.8 million judgment against Chris Kyle’s’ widow. The responses at Twitchy express how I feel.

** 17 **

I’m not much for Twitter (its enforced brevity doesn’t work well with my loquacity), but even I’d noticed that AP’s tweets have become semi-literate and manifestly biased. A once somewhat decent news agency has utterly debased itself.

** 18 **

In her logical, kind, impartial way, Megan McArdle completely destroys Mary Mapes, the gal who produced the “news” segment that led to Rathergate. McArdles article isn’t just interesting on its own terms. I also think every young lawyer should read it as a primer about how to use evidence for advocacy.

** 19 **

Was Mika tired? Did she have a stroke? Or was her DemProg brain overwhelmed by the logic she’d heard from Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer? We’ll never know, but we do know that she made an embarrassing verbal mistake as she sent the Morning Joe Show over to commercial:

Perhaps given the fatal taint in the original Constitution (that it accepted slavery), there’s a divine justice in the fact that our nation’s freedoms are being destroyed by a sort-of black man. The irony would be more perfect if he were the descendant of slaves, but I guess irony isn’t picky about the instruments it uses.

The illegal aliens, incidentally, are not grateful:

** 21 **

A lot of Marin’s young people tend to go off to exotic locales to do volunteer work. It’s nice that they recognize their good fortune, but I often think there’s an unwholesome element of “white man’s burden” to these journeys. After all, there’s poverty and despair in America too. One of these volunteers has finally realized that her “voluntourism” is, at best, an ineffective way to help people, because it harnesses skills she lacks while ignoring those that she has.

** 22 **

Kevin Gallagher takes a humorless, pedantic stand against what he claims is Weird Al Yankovic’s humorless pedantry in “Word Crimes.” I, of course, found Word Crimes completely delightful. Anyway, as a lawyer, I incline to grammatic pedantry because I would guess that 80% of my commercial law cases involved problems arising from ambiguous language. Punctuation and grammar matter if clarity matters.

In any event, you don’t have to read Gallagher’s entire article, which oozes pedantic high dudgeon. Instead, enjoy the comments.

** 23 **

The science is in, and vegetarians are less healthy than meat eaters. Don’t get too excited, though, fellow carnivores. As Earl (who sent me this link) added, one has to consider that many people embrace vegetarianism because they are sick. Thus, Bill Clinton, a heart-attack-waiting to happen, embraced vegetarianism as a way to turn his health around. He would have entered the cohort ill and skewed the statistics.

The Left likes that it’s a party of “intellectuals” — witness all the university professors and their poor, brainwashed students who support the Democrat Progressive movement. In a post about geekdom’s new trendiness, Charles C. W. Cooke explains what I laboriously figured out after leaving school, which is that being academically-oriented is not same as actually being smart, let alone functional.

** 25 **

** 26 **

As always, my thanks to Earl, Caped Crusader, and Sadie, who were instrumental in helping me find the articles and images described here.

The Times of Israel has published what is alleged to be a transcript of a leaked telephone call between Obama and Netanyahu. Both Netanyahu and Obama are denying its truth, but I wonder. The substance is entirely consistent with Obama’s and Kerry’s public pronouncements, although much ruder, hectoring, hostile, and autocratic in tone. My suspicion is that Obama is denying it because he’s worried that it makes him look bad, and Bibi is denying it for the same reason — to help Obama save face in return for which, one hopes, Bibi gets something.

Israel’s Channel 1 publishes a Hebrew transcript of a portion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama’s telephone conversation Sunday, in which Obama is insistent that Israel unilaterally halt all military activities in the Gaza Strip.

The following is an English translation of the Hebrew account of the talk given in the report:

Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agrees to an immediate, unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities, in particular airstrikes.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And what will Israel receive in exchange for a ceasefire?

BO: I believe that Hamas will cease its rocket fire — silence will be met with silence.

BN: Hamas broke all five previous ceasefires. It’s a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

BO: I repeat and expect Israel to stop all its military activities unilaterally. The pictures of destruction in Gaza distance the world from Israel’s position.

BN: Kerry’s proposal was completely unrealistic and gives Hamas military and diplomatic advantages.

BO: Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities, Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the 2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the siege and restrictions on Gaza.

BN: Qatar and Turkey are the biggest supporters of Hamas. It’s impossible to rely on them to be fair mediators.

BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that it can choose its mediators.

BN: I protest because Hamas can continue to launch rockets and use tunnels for terror attacks –

BO: (interrupting Netanyahu) The ball’s in Israel’s court, and it must end all its military activities.

I’ll be spending this afternoon happily enjoying the company of relatives visiting from out of town. When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate these relatives that much. Now that I’m older, I’m know how important it is to keep up contact with people who knew you way back when. There are shared memories and beliefs that are irreplaceable and that are, in troubling times, deeply comforting.

And then there is the news, which isn’t so good in Obama’s America….

** 1 **

England has long been so favorable to radical Islam that Melanie Phillips wrote a whole, very excellent, book — Londonistan — on the subject. That’s why it was staggering to see the Times of London run an ardently pro-Israel opinion piece. The author is Richard Kemp, a retired British Army man who’s long been an open and intelligent Israel supporter. That he wrote the article was therefore unsurprising. The surprise was that Kemp was given a voice in the Times.

The article is also worth reading insofar as it rebuts British people who contend that Israel is morally disreputable because she’s bombing Gaza, something modern Britain never did to Northern Ireland. (Historic Britain, of course, routinely laid waste to all of Ireland, both through actual war and economic warfare.)

Gaza is not Northern Ireland and Hamas is not the IRA. We governed and policed Ulster to wipe out the terrorists. In Gaza the government are the terrorists — designated as such around the world. In 2005 Israel withdrew all its citizens and security forces from Gaza. Since then it has been a separate state — now under the heel of Hamas — at war with Israel and dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish state.

Hamas is a heavily armed militia, fighting from territory it controls. The IRA, for the most part, was more like a highly dangerous criminal gang that could be dealt with by soldiers acting as policemen.

The absence of Israeli forces in Gaza for nine years let Hamas build tunnel networks to smuggle in military materiel, manufacture and store munitions, deploy forces and infiltrate beneath the border to launch attacks against Israel. It also gave Hamas the freedom to prepare formidable defences, the reason why there have been so many casualties since the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) began its ground offensive a week ago.

For a while there were barricaded “no-go” areas in Belfast and Londonderry which, until broken down in 1972, prevented the entry of troops. But the security forces never withdrew from the province and did not need to launch raids from Britain or fight their way back in.

The better comparison, says Kemp, is to the Nazi V1 “doodlebugs” rained down on London civilians, something that provoked an immediate and fearsome Allied response.

And now a brief non-Israel/Gaza moment to promote a product important to the well-informed conservative: Doug Ross is a long-time blogging friend. He started Bad Blue News, a really smart news aggregator, as a way to promote trending content that conservatives find interesting. Because its got an incredibly smart, dynamic algorithm for sourcing content, it’s always got breaking news. Learn more about it here and consider seriously making it part of your daily rounds.

Back to our regular Israel/Gaza War reporting….

** 4 **

Part of the problem with reporting on the Israel/Gaza war is the same problem that’s affected all reporting from that region: Hamas threatens reporters who try to publish content other than Hamas propaganda — and the reporters lack the courage either to ignore the threats (something I, a physical coward, understand) or to tell their readers and editors that they cannot report accurately from Gaza.

The other part of the problem with reporting, of course, is anti-Israel, anti-Semitic bias. When Muslims kill each other, the world (especially the journalistic world) shrugs its collective shoulders and just says “That’s what Muslims do.” The Left holds Islam to an unreasonably low standard and holds Israel to an impossibly high standard.

** 6 **

For those of us who wish the IDF would just take out Hamas in Gaza entirely — kind of like the Marines cleared out Fallujah — that’s clearly not what Netanyahu wants to have happen. This is not political cowardice on his part. Bibi is engaged in an incredibly complex balancing act that involves keeping all of the surrounding loathsome players (Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, etc.) out of the dispute. I pray daily for his continued wisdom in this regard.

** 7 **

Jews have always been plagued by genocide libels. Early Christians blamed all generations of Jews for the acts of some Jews during Jesus’s lifetime. Later Christians (and modern Muslims) have contended that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzoh, never mind that this wouldn’t be kosher and, more importantly, never mind that Judaism is built around a reverence for life, not death.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the Russians came out with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that’s still a bestseller in the fever swamps of Leftist and Muslim antisemitism. And now there’s a new blood libel: the Israelis are committing genocide against the Palestinians. Dennis Prager makes short work of it.

** 8 **

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the dynamics of a war with an entity that is utterly evil but that still that has all of Europe and most of the world’s press on its side. (And yes, I understand that the previous sentence would qualify for one of James Taranto’s “Fox Butterfield, is that you?” questions.)

** 9 **

Brett Stephens explains exactly how you have to be really stupid, or just act really stupid, to side with Hamas in the current war. He calls this “the Palestine effect” — “The abrupt and often total collapse of logical reasoning, skeptical intelligence and ordinary moral judgment whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering arises.”

**10 **

Of course, sometimes just being Muslim leads to bizarre thought patterns. Go here, and then try to figure out whether you want to laugh or cry.

** 11 **

Israel provides chapter and verse explaining that it was a Hamas rocket that took out an UNRWA School. Of course, thanks to stupid, immoral, and cowardly reporting, it’s enough for Hamas to say, without proof, “Israel did it” for the world to believe Hamas, not Israel.

If you read only one thing today (and tomorrow too), I think you should read Sam Harris’s “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?” In it, Harris, who is renowned for his very well-articulated atheism, explains that one doesn’t have to believe in Israel’s religious right to the land in order to support her in the current war with Hamas.

The article is very dense, but never boring or confusing. Harris methodically works his way through the case for Israel. He’s not a starry-eyed Israel fan. He is, instead, a realist who feels that any moral compass, atheist or religious, must come down on the side that values human life, rather than the one that destroys it.

To whet your appetite, here’s just one very small segment of his entire article:

The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies.

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants. [Note: The term “Muslims” in this paragraph means “Muslim combatants” of the sort that Western forces have encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The term “jihadists” would have been too narrow, but I was not suggesting that all Muslims support the use of human shields or are anti-Semitic, at war with the West, etc.]

Once you’ve read the whole thing, please share it with everyone. It deserves to make the rounds.

** 2 **

Hamas is so determined to win the war against Israel by having the tallest pile of dead bodies that it physically beats people who try to evacuate buildings after receiving Israel’s humanitarian warnings that it will be bombing the buildings. And that, of course, is precisely Sam Harris’s point.

** 3 **

As a writer, one of the most incredibly flattering things that can happen is when someone you really respect takes one of your ideas and runs with it. That’s what happened when Neo-Neocon read my post about John Kerry’s history repeating itself. I don’t want to give anything away. Just go and read what she has to say, making my original germ of an idea much richer and more meaningful.

** 4 **

What is that saying about the Left corrupting all institutions over time? I forget the exact words, but that’s precisely what happened to George H.W. Bush’s Thousand Points of Light charity. From being an innocuous charity, it’s managed to go from the ridiculous (funding gay and lesbian bands all over the world) to the malignant (funding organizations with Islamic terrorist ties).

That the Left would co-opt an organization in this way isn’t news. What is news is that Sen. Sam Nunn’s daughter, Michelle, was CEO during the charity’s transition from charitable to Leftist political. She’s now running for the Senate in Georgia (as a Democrat, natch). She’s trailing the Republican candidate, but the election would be safer if she were trailing even more — and this story should be the nail in her campaign’s coffin.

** 6 **

What unites Americans? Floods of illegal aliens crossing the United States’ southern border. They don’t like it. They really don’t like it.

Not that this will deter Obama. He views amnesty as a convenient red flag he can wave before Republicans in the hope that they will seek to impeach him, rousing Democrats from their demoralized torpor and swinging the 2014 election in Obama’s favor.

Think about this: Our president, who swore to obey the Constitution, is deliberately violating it, at great cost to our nation, so as to achieve two goals: (1) Creating a Democrat demographic wave by wiping out our southern border and (2) tempting Republicans into a politically fatal maneuver.

For Obama, it’s a win any way he looks at it, and for Republicans and other American loving people, all outcomes are disastrous. (And yes, executive orders can easily be overruled, but do you see anyone having the political will to deport all 5 million newly amnestied illegals, including the hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals?)

I cannot think of a more appalling attack on the integrity of a judicial system than a judge having an affair with the wife in a divorce case over which he is presiding. The husband, unsurprisingly, would like to see the judge in court, only this time with the judge sitting at the defendant’s table. Sadly, thanks to judicial immunity, that won’t be happening. Wade McCree, Jr., is out of a job, but he gets to keep his money.

Long-time readers know that, having come of age as a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Leftist judges infest the bench, I have almost no respect for judges. In my career, I’ve probably come across three whom I respect, one of whom is a long-time friend I respected before she became a judge.

In a system governed by the rule of law, we definitely need judges. But we need a very specific type of judge: Someone who recognize the rule of law, not the rule of Leftist navel-gazing and self-indulgent emotional masturbation.

I’m going to have a lot of stuff about the Israel/Hamas showdown (of course) but, for those of you who are interested in other stuff, don’t despair. I’ll have other stuff too.

** 1 **

I’ve often mentioned StandWithUs, an organization that was founded to fight the growing antisemitism on American campuses. During the current war, StandWithUs has used social media on Israel’s behalf.

One of the things it started was a campaign that sees people mailing pictures of the cover of their passport, along with a message on the palm of their hand: “I stand with Israel.” This article describes the campaign, and this link takes you to the page where you can upload your photo.

I dug out my passport yesterday and sent my message. If your passport is handy, perhaps you can too. When a war is fought, not just on the field of battle, but around the world in cyberspace, these things matter.

** 2 **

One of the things Muslims do when they conquer a territory is to erect their prayer towers at a height higher than any other building in the community. Not only does this visually prove their dominance, it also forces everyone around to hear the Muslim call to prayer (which Obama described as “the sweetest sound I know“). Lately, to ensure that everyone hears that “sweetest sound,” Muslims have taken to blasting the call to prayer out on loudspeakers. In Israel, some residents finally had enough and blasted out a few prayers of their own.

** 3 **

The Lancet, founded in 1823, was once one of England’s most prestigious medical journals. During the Iraq War, though, it proved that it had become just another hack Leftist mouthpiece when it published an article in 2004 claiming that 68,000 Iraqis had died from U.S. attacks, a number it updated in 2006 to 655,000. All these numbers were resoundingly debunked, but the study still had an impact, inflaming the usual suspects in the Muslim world and on the Left.

Flush with the success of its last disinformation campaign, The Lancet is at it again, with a completely unsourced diatribe against Israel (which I won’t dignify with a link). Two Israeli physicians tried to get The Lancet to publish a well-sourced rebuttal but, although a reputable science publication would have willingly published that rebuttal, The Lancet naturally refused. If you, however, would like to learn truth via data, rather than lies via screeds, go here.

** 4 **

Hamas fighters may be getting demoralized, but its leaders are feeling flush with success. They’ve got a pile of dead children for photo ops, they got flights to Israel shut down for 24 hours, Jews in Europe are under siege in a way reminiscent of 1938, American streets are filled with thousands of pro-Hamas marchers, and the President and Secretary of State are fully on-board with Hamas’s agenda. To the relief of Israel supporters around the world, though, Israel appears to be thumbing its nose at the Obama regime and, instead, is focusing on its own security. This focus means continuing the Gaza operation so as to shut down those tunnels.

** 5 **

Europeans are, as always, fully supportive of Hamas. Part of this is age-old antisemitism. Part of it is Leftism. Part of it is a way of blaming Jews for Auschwitz and the purges and pogroms in which even conquered countries cheerfully participated.

And part of it, apparently, is the European Union’s ongoing battle with the U.S. for world supremacy. Once upon a time the U.S. supported Israel against the Soviet Union, which supported the Arabs. Now, the EU is supporting the Arabs against the U.S.’s long-standing support for Israel.

The only flaw in that plan is that, thanks to Barack Obama, the U.S. is also supporting the Arabs, so that the EU isn’t distinguishing itself from the U.S. at all. (See here and here, for articles supporting the conclusion that Obama is no longer bother to hide his pro-Hamas, anti-Israel stance.)

The problem, of course, is that despite its vileness, Facebook is still the only game in town when it comes to spreading political messages throughout ones community of friends, acquaintances, and followers. For example, I know that many of my “real me” Facebook friends couldn’t care less about Israel or, since they’re DemProgs, they kind of vaguely support Hamas.

Because I’m inundating my feed, though, with clear, pro-Israel posters, there’s a possibility that this information will subliminally seep into their brains and value systems. After all, that’s how Hollywood did it in the 1970s through today: they subliminally changed people’s values through “entertainment” shows that were really “info-tainment” shows for Leftist ideas.

** 7 **

The Son of Hamas understands both how nihilistic that organization is and that its ultimate goal is world conquest for a caliphate:

** 8 **

Here’s another insight into how Muslims think — and it’s not the way people raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition think.

And finally, on to other, non-Israel/Hamas stuff:

** 9 **

I know that there are bad cultures that care for and wouldn’t gratuitously hurt animals (witness Hitler’s and the Nazi’s love for dogs), but are there any good cultures that gratuitously hurt and torture animals? I can’t think of any. Anyway, the following video is darling:

If you’ve been following the Bakken crude oil debate — which sees critics claiming that it’s too volatile to ship, and therefore useless — here are some actual facts explaining that it’s perfectly shippable (which, if it isn’t a word, ought to be).

** 11 **

The facts: A gun-toting man enters a gun-free hospital and begins firing, killing one person. He is stopped only because one of the staff doctors, ignoring the hospital’s gun-free status, shoots him, saving untold numbers of lives. The logic in Left land: Gun free zones should stay gun free because guns are dangerous.

No matter how many times you point out that the only way to stop a mass shooter is if a good guy with a gun shows up (whether that guy is on site or whether it takes 20 minutes for armed police to arrive), the Left insists that just declaring a zone “gun free” will save lives. It’s this kind of stupidity that practically drove me into the arms of conservativism.

** 12 **

Teacher’s unions — not individual teachers, many of whom are devoted and wonderful, but teacher’s unions — are harming American schools. This video perfectly describes my public school experiences growing up in San Francisco:

Remember Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who was for withholding funds from federal Obamacare exchanges before he was against it? Well, there’s more….

(And here’s something cool: I bet you recognize the website at that link. You should, because Hube, at the Colossus of Rhodey is one of my longtime Watcher’s Council friends. It turns out that the man who unearthed the first Gruber video was one of Hube’s old classmates. When he needed a forum to take down Gruber and reinforce Halbig, he went calling on his old friend who is now a conservative blogger.)

** 15 **

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have been iconic figures since the end of the 19th century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not write them as gay characters. Indeed, Dr. Watson adores women and eventually marries, leaving Holmes alone in the flat at Baker Street. With the renewed popularity of Sherlock Holmes and Watson thanks to a recent BBC series, the LGBTQ crowd thinks Holmes and Watson need an upgrade: They should become gay lovers.

Hmmm. Thinking. … Thinking. … Thinking. … Nope. I just don’t see it. What I do see, though, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spinning in his grave.

** 16 **

One of the things conservatives constantly need to re-learn is that the culture wars are never won. When one side gains temporary dominance, the other side than begins a renewed charge to end that dominance. We’re currently in a period of Leftist dominance that has (finally) started a nascent conservative comeback. Should we win, we’ll naturally, and stupidly, rest on our laurels, creating a vacuum that the Left will aggressively rush to fill.

I mention all this because America may have won WWII in 1945, but the war is still being fought at the academic level. When the Smithsonian first mounted a Hiroshima exhibit 15 years ago, the Left seemed to have won, making the exhibit all about American imperialist aggression. Five men successfully fought back, but even they caution that the fight is never over.

What I didn’t realize (or didn’t remember) about Stein, is that his father, Joseph Stein, wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof, a show that simultaneously helped pro-Jewish and pro-Israel feeling around the world, even while offending religious Jews with its message favoring assimilation. Joseph Stein was the kind of Jew I knew growing up: educated, funny, creative, and very, very Left.

Harry has written a lovely homage to his father (who died in 2010, aged 98 years), managing to maintain his love and respect for the man whose political and social values Harry so definitively rejected.

** 18 **

(Thanks to Earl and Sadie, who contribute to every post I write by sending me wonderful articles and images. Caped Crusader is also one of my main sources for images and anecdotes, although I don’t think any of his contributions made it to this particular post.)

Yesterday, I went to an exhibition soccer game — Real Madrid versus Inter Milan. The game, held in UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, was sold out. Despite that, it was a surprisingly lackluster game.

I think that flat feeling arose from a combination of factors. First, it wasn’t a real game, with real consequences. The players, mostly B-List players for both teams, looked more as if they were practicing than competing. Second, the mellow fans were generally enjoying the exhibition quality of the game, so they were cheering both sides equally. While this was very polite, it sucked the energy out of the stadium. In a real competitive game, you want some passion from the audience, as well as from the players.

And third, we were in the nosebleed section. I’m not complaining. It was lovely up there (albeit a little hot), especially since the field was spread out before us. I felt like an eagle. I also realized looking down on the field that soccer reminds me of WWI.

This is not as crazy an analogy as you might think. The players endlessly cycled back and forth over a few yards, constantly getting near each other’s goal and then being repulsed. Although each team played fluidly together, the nature of soccer meant there weren’t any set plays.

Watching it from up high, I thought that, in a way, this would have been what WWI’s trench warfare would have looked like to an alien being perched on a far-away planet, watching the war play out. The two sides faced off against each other and, up until the Americans came along, just endlessly pushed each other back and forth over the same 8 miles.

American football strikes me as being more like traditional American warfare. The battalion, or division, or unit, or whatever, comes up with a strategy and then charges ahead. Ideally, it gains ground and holds it. Less ideally, it gets pushed back and has to regroup. The discipline, though, requires unified forward motion, rather than an endlessly fluid back and forth.

When my kids played, I loved soccer because it made them run, which kids need, and I enjoyed watching my little darlings compete. Without one of my own kids on the field, I definitely like American football better than soccer.

** 2 **

In my earlier post, I said Hamas is worse than the Nazis were. One of the reasons I said that is that the Nazis valued their own (not their enemy’s, but their own) children. Hamas, however, has decided that its children’s greatest utility is to act the role of corpse — and the younger the Palestinian child, the more enthusiastically Hamas tries to turn it into a dead body.

It turns out that Hamas’s disdain for its children exists independent of an active war with Israel. By its own admission, Hamas used its children as slave labor to build the many tunnels under Israel. One-hundred-sixty of those children died.

I know I’m going to like the book because it touches upon a subject I’ve long blogged about, which is the death of the Jew in American culture. Jews no longer exist in American culture. That marks a sea change from the situation in most of the 20th century. From the 1910s through the 1970s, Jews were omnipresent, acting, singing, writing, producing, directing…. They made us laugh, cry, and think. That’s all vanished now. The decline of American Jewry’s role in American life has mirrored Israel’s rise and fall in the eyes of the world.

** 4 **

Antisemitism is a completely irrational hatred. In Islam, antisemitism is predicated upon the words of a 7th century “prophet” who resented the fact that the Jews refused to abandon their faith in favor of his newly created one. For those thankfully few Christians who still hew to old-time antisemitism, their hatred for all Jews in the present day is because, 2,000 years ago, a very small group of Jews aided Christ to his destiny by turning him over to the Romans. For Leftists, hatred of Jews was born out of a 19th century hatred for those few Jews who were visibly capitalist, and now arises from the fact that, until Obama, Israel was seen as inextricably intertwined with America, the bastion of capitalism. None of the preceding justifications for hating Jews springs from a rational source.

Because antisemitism is irrational, it leads to truly stupid outcomes, revealing brains so steeped in hatred they are incapable of thought. Exhibit A is the BBC’s insane, inane tweet about Hamas’s unilateral breach of one of the cease-fires:

Sarah Palin makes a good case for impeachment. Those who are opposed to immediate impeachment don’t look at President Obama’s conduct but, instead, look at the dynamics of impeachment: It makes for incredibly bad optics if Republicans impeach the first black president, especially right before an election. This means, of course, that Republicans are damned if they do (bad optics) and damned if they don’t (unconstitutional loose cannon in the White House).

Palin makes the point that, if we want to shift that dynamic, we need to educate the public so that more than 33% of them support impeachment:

Let’s go back to that poll I cited showing 33% of Americans agree with me on impeachment. It’s clear from the way these polls are conducted that most Americans aren’t aware of what constitutes impeachable offenses.

The Constitution says “high crimes and misdemeanors” are the basis for this serious remedy. The Framers used that term to mean a dereliction of duty, and the first duty of the president is to enforce our laws and preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton described impeachable offenses as “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He called them “political” offenses because they “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

[snip]

Impeachment isn’t necessarily for ordinary criminal acts, nor is it for bad political decisions or differences in opinion. We’re not saying, “Impeach him because his stimulus failed; he coddles Wall Street while dissing Main Street; he recklessly spends our tax dollars on skewed priorities, etc., etc.”

We’re saying he must be impeached for overstepping his Constitutional authority. Here are some examples: he broke the law in changing the Obamacare law by fiat, and he issued amnesty for illegal immigrants by fiat, and he committed fraud on the American people by lying that we could keep our health care if we like our health care, and he refused to secure our borders or halt this border crisis he caused. The list of abuse is long. Allowing any president to continue this lawlessness sets a precedent for future presidents that can allow destruction of our nation.

We’re acknowledging that there’s only one recourse in holding government accountable when led by a president who breaks the law. Remember the Constitution holds the president directly responsible for the executive branch. He can’t just vote “present” and keep feigning ignorance of all the scandals rocking his administration, any more than a mob boss can claim innocence because he didn’t personally do the hit. The buck stops with the guy at the top.

[snip]

Impeachment is the Constitution’s answer for a derelict, incompetent presidency, as well as for a lawless imperial presidency. Both describe the unprecedented problem we have with Obama.

** 7 **

AJStrata isn’t opposed to impeachment. He just says that it must wait until after the November election. In the meantime, he sees Obama as someone who is buying more than enough rope to hang himself. After all, executive actions are ephemeral, and can be undone as easily as they were done in the first place.

AJ thinks that Obama is trying to force impeachment before the election in the hope that it will hand Democrats a victory in November. The whole calculus changes — dramatically — if the Republicans sweep both House and Senate.

So, patience, everyone (including you, Sarah Palin). Patience is a great virtue and, as the next story shows, the lack of patience can be profoundly damaging. (Although in the case of the next story, thank God for impatience.)

** 8 **

I’ve pointed out in previous posts that, had Hamas been able to restrain itself from firing rockets into Israel, it would probably have successfully used its tunnels to invade Israel on Rosh Hashanah, killing thousands and kidnapping hundreds. Clarice Feldman makes an even better point:

The reason Hamas couldn’t resist firing rockets was because Israel was turning over every stone in an effort, first, to locate Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, and then, once it was known they were murdered, to find their killers. (Incidentally, did I miss it or was President Obama completely silent about the brutal antisemitic murder of an American citizen? After all, Fraenkel held dual citizenship.)

So the real reason that Israel was able to deter a terror attack that would have rivaled in scope the 9/11 attack on Israel was because three young boys died at Hamas’s hands. I don’t know if it can, but I still hope that this knowledge brings some comfort to the boys’ families. In a weird way, it means that the boys did not die in vain, since their deaths almost certainly saved thousands of lives.

** 9 **

When I took my daughter to a college fair, I ended up talking to a young woman from Austin, Texas, which is a lovely city despite a Leftist insanity rivaled only by Berkeley and Ann Arbor. I commented, as I always do when I talk about Texas, that I loved it there, but that the heat was killing. The woman told me earnestly that it’s much worse now thanks to global warming. I spared my daughter the embarrassment of calling that young woman on her uninformed lunacy. I bet the woman also thinks Austin is both wetter and dryer before — two assumptions that are completely wrong.

Just so you can get a feel for what the United States would look like if Progressives were completely in control, check out the insane San Francisco landlord scene. To call what landlords own there “private property” is an extraordinary misnomer. It’s “private property” in name only:

Landlords are challenging San Francisco’s latest move to discourage evictions from rent-controlled apartments, an ordinance requiring them to pay displaced tenants the difference between their current rent and the amount needed to rent a similar unit at market rates for two years.

** 12 **

Hamas treats Jews and its own people like disposable objects. Israel treats Palestinians like human beings: